


until the devil's turned to dust

by spymastery



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Chaptered, F/M, Gen, Minor Original Character(s), Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Period-Typical Sexism, Plus sized Original Character, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:27:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24973072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spymastery/pseuds/spymastery
Summary: Her father was a Blinder. Her mother, broken-hearted with grief. The War took her brother and spat him back out, bound to a wheelchair and locked in self-imposed exile. She had a little sister, too, but little Edda never saw ten years old.Mattie Wharton only has herself when you get down to it. Or, at least, that was true until Polly Gray offered the seamstress a commission for three suits -- one for each of the Shelby brothers: the soft-spoken and serious Thomas, the rowdy shit-stirrer John, and Arthur, the beast with soft eyes. They're all trouble, but they're familiar trouble and mending their suits just might be worth enough money to make her look the other way.
Relationships: Arthur Shelby/Original Character(s), Arthur Shelby/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 70





	1. CHAPTER I : iii.

**Author's Note:**

> On the clock’s third chime, Mattie Wharton set a bundle of dark gray fabric down on the crowded walnut desk in front of her and sank backwards. She rubbed at her eyes, scrubbing hard enough for them to come away blurry once her hands collapsed into her lap. 

The dreary spit of rain falling outside and the waning crackle of a fire were the only sounds that reached her ears inside of Mister Chapman’s shop once the clock stopped at three chimes.

Not four. Thank God for that.

Stretching her arms high above her head, she straightened her back until she felt the barest hint of a twinge, which was no small feat after five hours of work on her own. Her sore, chubby fingers splayed in the air before thumping back down to the desk, knuckles smarting against the wood.

She needed a break. She needed a moment to herself and —

Her stomach rumbled.

— and something to eat, to drink, to take her mind off of the job at hand.

Three suits, tailored to fit three bodies. 

Polly Gray’s instructions had been clear. The last thing she needed was for her nosy boss to snatch up a list of items detailing work he hadn’t assigned her.

Work would be done on the suits after hours, on her own time. The boys would be available when they were needed for measurements to be taken. Thomas Shelby, first. John Shelby, second, “due to his short legs requiring more work on your part.” And Arthur Shelby, third. If her work was commendably done, she could rely upon more of their business in the future. 

It was that offer that kept her working well into the night on a suit. It was that offer that had her watching Mister Chapman during their daytime work, fitting sleeves and shoulders, pinning hems. There was nothing you couldn’t learn with a little observation when something so promising waited on the horizon. She’d watch Frank Chapman fit suits for twelve hours a day if it meant working on her own and not having to weather his constant leering and his traveling hands.

Mattie squinted down at the suit jacket that pooled on her desk. Her table, really. Desks had drawers, and all she had were baskets underneath that carried thread and ribbons and stray bolts of fabric. 

Frank had an official-looking desk and a grand, cushioned chair that her aching ass felt a certain amount of envy towards.

His scissors were shiny, too. And sharp.

Shaking her head, Mattie lifted the jacket back up and began working on the second sleeve with renewed focus. 

If she stabbed him like he deserved, she’d be arrested, and the coppers were worse. She’d get blood all over the pretty bundles of cloth, too, and they deserved better than that, better than him. Just like she did.

Which was precisely what she was determined to get.

She sucked in a deep breath and steadied her tired hands. Early adjustments were made by sewing machine, but the mechanisms were louder than a fucking forge and the rest of Small Heath seemed to be asleep. So, she stitched by hand and firelight like a 17th century maid for the sake of her future.

As she worked, she remembered another element to Mrs. Gray’s instructions.

“The moment you’re done,” the woman told her as she laid a hand on her shoulder, eyes heavy-lidded and dark and penetrating, “I want you to bring the suit to our place on Watery Lane, no matter the hour. D’you agree to our terms?”

Mattie had nodded without thinking. She nodded to calm the thrill and the fear inside of her. 

No one in Birmingham was a mere bystander when it came to the Shelby family and their fledgling empire. You either had family in the Peaky Blinders, working for the Peaky Blinders, or dead because of the Peaky Blinders. She had at least one of all three, so she knew how to swallow the fear just as keenly as she knew she should feel it.

The clock chimed four times only a few minutes before she finished with John’s suit.

Mister Chapman opened his shop at eight in the morning, but expected her there with breakfast by seven. That gave her three hours to clean up the shop, get to Watery Lane and deliver the suit, walk home, tend to her cat, look in on her brother, bathe, sleep, make breakfast, and get to the shop before his sausages were cold. There weren’t enough hours in the night. And there was the rain.

By half-past four, Mattie emerged from the darkened tailor’s shop with John Shelby’s suit tucked safely beneath her wool coat. The weather hadn’t decided to be completely unhelpful, so the cool piddle on the top of her head made matters damper rather than worse.

Candles poured squares of light down onto the streets, dotting her path with blocks of gold as she hurried towards the Shelby family home with the direction she’d been given in mind. 

Watery Lane. The Shelby home, the Shelby betting shop. 

But what would she do if no one answered the door? Would she have to return later, during the time she was given for lunch? Mrs. Gray had instructed her to bring the suit to their home no matter the hour. 

Every wet brick and every wet stone shone under moonlight as she slowed to a stop in front of the familiar doorstep. She took a moment to gather herself and catch her breath, not having even realized the brisk pace she’d set for herself. Pacing back and forth, her chest rose and fell beneath her damp coat, chasing out the flushed and overwhelmed feelings as best she could as she remembered how to stop puffing.

Taking the first step, Mattie hugged the gray suit to her chest. 

Taking the second, she wobbled a little, exhausted, and felt a jolt of anxiety strong enough to shove away the weariness.

Taking the third, she lifted her hand and knocked on the door three times.

She waited in the rain until a limp curl finally slid down into her face and heavy footsteps were heard behind the door, clomping down what sounded like a stairwell. She didn’t know who to expect. Would it be John, waiting for his suit? Or Tommy, awake at all hours and pouring over his plans? Or Polly, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth?

The door opened, and Mattie’s tired eyes squinted into the sudden rush of lamplight.

Arthur Shelby leaned against the worn frame of the door with the neck of a bottle in one hand and a glazed look in what she could see of his eyes given the shadow. He stood there without saying a word, squinting at her to mirror how she squinted into the light.

“I brought—”

“John’s suit, eh?” He took a step back. With the arm holding the whiskey, he gave a sweeping gesture in the same direction. “Get outta the rain, at least. You don’t wanna get it wet.”

Mattie hadn’t expected to be invited in. No one in her family had ever been invited into the Shelby’s parlor, not even her father when he was still on the up and up with them. He stuck to Charlie Strong’s yard and the Garrison, catching the occasional glimpse of the Shelby boys before heading home to his sad, little house at the edge of town. 

But, there she was, standing on their rain-soaked doorstep as Arthur Shelby’s invitation hung in the cool nighttime air.

“A deaf seamstress, huh?” Arthur gestured again with a much wider and more pronounced arc. “Takes all fuckin’ kinds, I guess.”

“Deaf?”

Mattie’s voice was a small thing and uneven with surprise. A similar surprise to what Arthur must have felt when she spoke, given how his eyes doubled in size and he stumbled over a muttered, “Fuck.”

The shock rushed out of her along with an undignified little snort of laughter.

She took the final step up before passing the threshold with a bubbling shyness in her belly, paying no mind to Arthur as he watched her carefully remove the folded suit from within the confines of her coat. 

“Mrs. Gray said that I ought to bring the suit, no matter the time.” When she mimicked the woman’s words to the letter, she nearly sounded like her. “I’m sorry if I woke ya.”

Arthur laughed into the mouth of his whiskey bottle. 

That was all the explanation she needed. He hadn’t been sleeping, though it seemed he was close by the squared-off sag of his shoulders and the heaviness of his feet and the slur in his voice when he asked her, “Want a drink? Manners’n all that. Pol would approve.”

He jiggled the bottle at her. The amber liquid inside swirled against the glass like a strong-smelling sea.

“It’s half-past four.” Mattie cradled the suit against her chest and the blessedly dry fabric of her blouse. “I don’t… think so.”

Arthur’s face twisted downward in an expression that could only mean, ‘More for me,’ and he gave a one-armed shrug before turning away. “You look like you could use one, is all.”

Catching a glimpse of herself in an old, cloudy mirror that hung in the entrance, Mattie stuffed a distraught noise down the back of her throat. 

Her eyes were red as much as they were blue, and they carried dark purple bags above the splotchy flush of her round cheeks. Her hair wasn’t even soaked through, but there was no saving the curls. If they weren’t slack, they were frizzy, and they hung down around the collar of her coat in wet clumps as if they were strangers. A few late nights in a row hadn’t been kind to her, and they didn’t make the best impression.

Gathering her quickly disintegrating confidence up in her arms along with the suit, she hurried after him as he disappeared around the corner.

“The suit’ll have to be pressed,” Mattie said as she rushed after Arthur and his long, skinny legs. “To get out the wrinkles.”

“Mhm.”

Only a short distance from the hallway was a dining room full of mismatched china and knick knacks and doilies. The walls were covered in ornate wallpaper and lined with dark wood. A coal fire burned at the back as the only light in the room, casting long shadows along the wooden floorboards. Arthur’s shadow stretched nearly back into the hall, while hers stopped midway, twice as round and shapeless in her thigh-length coat.

The Shelby household felt imposing in a way she couldn’t quite understand, as if there wasn’t room enough to breathe with all the decoration and all the bloody history.

“… Mrs. Gray said he had a cap to match, but if the color isn’t right, I can convince the milliner to give you a discount.”

“We already get discounts.” Arthur twisted around to look at her, walking backwards though he nearly bumped into the side of the long table standing in the middle of the room. He swerved with a click of his tongue before offering her the bottle again. “But kind of ya.”

Mattie took the bottle and gently pushed her full lips to the mouth of it, tipping the heavy glass back and taking the smallest sip that could still be understood as polite. It burned like hell, but the flavor was familiar enough to not make her sputter. She handed the bottle back in an instant, blood rising in her ears rather than adding to the messy splotches on her cheeks.

“I need to take your measurements.”

Arthur’s laugh echoed through the room, loud and sharp and brittle, standing in stark contrast to her feeble little snort from before. “Me measurements? Have a ruler on you, do ya?”

Setting the suit down onto the table, Mattie set about rummaging through the deep pockets of her coat. She removed a reel of measuring tape from one buttoned pocket at the front and a small pad and well-used pencil from one in the lining, setting all three things down beside the coat with a deep sigh. Her mouth tasted of whiskey and her head was a circling mess with lack of sleep, but she needed to focus.

She had one suit left to tailor before the commission was through.

One.

“It’s not a ruler,” Mattie said as she nudged the measuring tape with her forefinger, “But, yes, your measurements.”

She pinned her shoulders back and lifted her pudgy chin to stare up into his eyes. Hers were blurry around the edges and tired; his, red from drinking. But they stared at each other, as if doing a bit of their own measuring. Their measuring wasn’t about inches.

Would he forgo stubbornness and listen to her instructions? Would she weather his teasing and drunken stumbling? 

It was Mattie who spoke first, reaching for the measuring tape without breaking eye contact. The cool, metal reel slid into her palm as if it belonged there.

“You’ll need to lose the suit jacket.”

Arthur tipped his head and the bottle back, giving a satisfied smack once he’d nursed another few mouthfuls from the bottle. It joined the suit and her notepad on the table at a safe distance, and the jacket was lost once he tugged his skinny arms through the sleeves and discarded it across the back of a chair.

His shirt was still mostly buttoned and mostly tucked, though there was a brown spatter of blood on the right breast that had long since dried. 

Mattie swallowed and fiddled with the measuring tape reel, unfurling a few inches before letting it zip back in on itself again as she watched him slide out of his suspenders, as well. They were left to dangle at his waist, deflated and almost sad.

“What goes first, eh?”

“I’ll start at the top.”

Arthur’s thin lips thinned even more when he pursed them. “Me head?”

She heaved a sigh and stepped up to him. “Not your head,” Mattie said, unable to suppress an amused, if tired, smile. “Your neck. The milliner who gives you discounts already measures your head.”

A moment passed before Arthur spat out a laugh. He pushed a knuckle up against his sharp jawline and cracked his neck to either side, his disheveled hair flipping with the movement of his head. Then, he worked open the first few buttons around his collar to bare enough of his throat to measure.

“Alright, alright,” he said in a rough, but placating tone. “The seamstress ain’t deaf, but she’s got fuckin’ sass.”

“Can you bend down?”

“And what else’ll you be needin’, Your Majesty?”

“Ooh!” Mattie hadn’t meant to make such a frustrated sound, but he pulled it out of her like a shot. She pinched her lips and unrolled twenty inches of measuring tape with a flick of her wrist. His bumbling was disarming. So disarming, in fact, that she found herself forgetting he was a Shelby brother and a Blinder. Her nostrils flared as she sucked in a calming breath. “I need you to bend down so I can take an accurate measurement.”

“Oh, right, right, right.” He bent down suddenly, bringing their faces so close she could see dirt and soot caught in the lines around his eyes. “’Cause you’re such a little thing.”

Taking the measuring tape and wrapping it around his throat, Mattie tucked her forefinger between the cloth and the warm skin of his neck. She eased the tape back into its metal reel before opening up her notebook and scribbling down a number.

“Lift your arms.”

She caught the barest glimpse of Arthur’s smug smile when he pulled back and did as she asked. Tommy had barely spoken to her when she took his measurements. He did as she asked with the sort of quiet efficiency that she expected from him. John sucked in when she measured his waist, but other than that, he saved the banter for the two out of four kids who insisted upon coming.

His torso was long, but Arthur was the narrowest of the three Shelby boys around the chest. Around the waist, too, even with John sucking in such a deep breath. Not that Arthur acted like the skinniest of the three. His plumage was brightest, in his eyes. Biggest, too.

It was when she went down onto her knees in the middle of the darkened dining room that _smug_ might have become _intolerable_. She hitched up her skirt to keep from kneeling on it and went down without a word, setting her notepad beside her on the floor before looking up at him with wide, blue eyes. He laughed under his breath before shaking it off and clearing his throat, his hand rubbing at his mouth.

And, surprisingly, said nothing about her being on her knees.

“I have four more measurements to take,” Mattie explained. She shifted, feeling her stockings snag on the floorboards beneath her. “That alright?”

Arthur cleared his throat again and stood up straight, shoulders pinned back and face serious despite the amusement shining in his eyes.

“More’n alright.”

It was late. Mattie was tired. Arthur was drunk. The Shelby house was dark. The woman who watched her brother had gone home four hours ago. She had one suit to finish altering in under three days. Mister Chapman wanted his breakfast in three hours. Her patience was an unspooled length of measuring tape without a reel to zip back into, but she furrowed her brow and focused on nothing but the tape in her hands as she wrapped it around his waist.

“Tom’s suit looks mighty fine.”

His attempts at casual conversation were more than a little stilted. They were damned awkward. He shifted on his feet, but never so much that it interrupted her work. It was all discomfort from a drunk man trying his best to play at being a sober one.

Mattie glanced up him when he spoke before marking down another number. “It was Mister Chapman who made them,” she murmured, eying the column of measurements. More quietly, at a volume not meant for his ears, she added, “If I had made your suits, they wouldn’t need so much extra work.”

“Now, there’s the reason I hired you,” came a voice from behind her. “You sound like me.”

The tone was husky and feminine, rich as wine. Mattie didn’t have to turn around to recognize it as belonging to Polly Gray. 

She sounded as exhausted as Mattie felt, as if she hadn’t been to bed yet… or had just rolled out of it. Still, her ears were sharper than Arthur’s, if she’d caught a belligerent little whisper like that in the air. None of the boys who’d fought in the War could hear very well anymore, not if they’d seen combat. Arthur had. Her brother, Sidney, had seen combat and worse. It took nearly screaming to get him to hear anything.

Mattie sat back on her heels and looked up at Arthur again, idly winding the measuring tape around her finger. “I hope you’ll like yours once I’m done with it.”

Surprise tumbled over his expression, as if he hadn’t expected her to talk back. His lips split open to talk, but he just grinned, all slightly crooked teeth and twitching mustache. 

“’M sure I will, Miss…”

“Wharton,” Polly filled in when Arthur floundered, leaving her place at the arch she stood under and moving into the room’s moonbeams and smoky firelight. “Sidney’s sister.”

Mattie lifted herself up onto her knees again and wrapped the measuring tape around the widest part of his hips. She couldn’t bear to see the recognition on Arthur’s face shift into pity, like it did with everyone else. For her brother, for her father — everyone knew her story, but so few knew her by her own merit. They would, eventually. She was sure of that, but it wasn’t balm enough for the sting.

“Yeah, yeah. I can see the resemblance,” Arthur said. He stood very still as she measured him, and when he spoke, she couldn’t hear pity in his voice. It made a certain kind of sense, considering how close Sidney and his brother had been during the War. He knew a different man, a different Sidney. “Was askin’ for her given name, though.”

“Mattie,” she said without looking up and without waiting for Polly to answer him.

“Mattie,” he echoed.

Scratching down another number along with a scribbled HIPS beside it, Mattie leaned up higher on her knees and unfurled a lengthier bit of measuring tape for the last of the measurements. To Arthur’s credit, he spread his legs before she even asked, sure to keep them straight and a good distance apart as she stretched the tape from his crotch to the floor. He didn’t even make a comment, not like the one John shot over to one of his sons.

In the next room, they heard the clatter of dishes and the ringing of a nail against tin and a warbling curse before everything went still. Then, the determined scuffle of footsteps against wooden slats as Polly left the kitchen and moved into the dining room to put her eyes on the clock.

“Oh, fuck, look at the time,” she said, tucking a hand up into her mess of red-brown curls. Polly twisted in Mattie and Arthur’s direction. “Isn’t it late for you?”

Once the length of his inseam was written down, Mattie flipped the notepad shut and tucked it into her coat’s inner pocket along with the stump of a pencil. She thumbed the button on the reel and let it zip itself back up, careful to avoid getting smarted by the metal attached to the end.

“Yeah, it is.” Mattie planted her hands on the floor and hefted herself up onto her feet. “I oughta be headin’ home.”

The sudden shift in position coupled with exhaustion and a mouthful of whiskey left her wobbling on her low heels. She reached out on instinct and instinct alone, steadying herself by gripping at Arthur’s forearms. He stared down at her as he held onto her elbows, his grip light. In shadow, his blue eyes were dark as puddles of rainwater without the light of the moon to make them shine. 

_Prussian blue,_ she thought. _And a little carbon black._

Mattie shook her head and dusted down her skirt as an embarrassed flush turned her ears red beneath her dried and even frizzier hair. The Shelby boys were trouble sight unseen, of course, but their eyes.

Their fucking eyes.

Anyone who’d seen Thomas Shelby in daylight could attest to the power they had, and he wasn’t the only one.

Polly Gray didn’t look up from the tea she was preparing to remind her: “The races are in three days.” 

She swirled a tiny spoon between her thumb and forefinger, clinking as she went. Once she was satisfied, she set the spoon down on the saucer and lifted the pretty little cup. “Three days. Three suits for three brothers. Three pounds for your work.” She made a quiet, amused noise in her throat. “Funny how that works out.”

Three breaths before she acknowledged the woman sitting at the table rather than staring right at Arthur Shelby, who flashed a knowing grin at her as if he held a winning hand.

Funny.

“I should finish the day before Cheltenham,” Mattie assured her. She tugged at her coat until it rested properly on her shoulders. Without John’s suit or the measuring tape in her hands, she found them fidgeting with pocket flaps and hems, unsure of what to do. They ached. She stretched them. “Early enough to leave time for a fitting.”

Taking a step back, she nodded to Arthur before nodding to Polly. The former picked up his bottle while the latter took another measured sip of tea, the lines around her eyes tensing when the scalding stuff hit her tongue. Neither of them said goodbye, but she could see it on Arthur’s face as he sank down into one of the wooden chairs around the table. He glanced at her twice before the third look lingered long enough to turn into a stare.

Mattie knew a Chinese girl named Jingyi from the street where she lived. She’d been taken in by a woman her family knew after her father was killed in London, and they spent a few years as friends when they were children. 

She remembered her soft hands and her quick smile and her pride when her birthday came around — the third daughter, the third of the month. Threes were lucky, Mattie remembered her saying. It stood for three important times in a person’s life, and the first step was birth. 

This was the start of something, at least.

The street was still shining and slick when she pushed through the Shelby family’s front door and into the rain. Without a suit to keep safe, Mattie allowed herself a loser stride, though no slower and no less worn out. She needed to get home before sunrise. She needed to check on her brother and bathe and make breakfast for Mister Chapman. Even if she only had a spare half-hour to put her feet up, it’d be better than nothing.

Watery Lane was silent at the hour when the sky turned from a sparkling blue-black to gray. Everyone was tucked up in their beds, except for her and Polly Gray and Arthur Shelby. At least they were out of the rain, so they had one up on her.

Heaving a sigh, Mattie rounded the corner and hurried down another shadowy few streets before finding her own. Every building looked the same in the dark, but her bones knew where to turn, as if she tied a string around her ribs every morning before she left for work.

Individual sets of stairs lolled out onto the sidewalk like stone tongues with painted wooden doors for teeth. One near the end of the lane belonged to her — narrower than most of them, with a door painted dark green in the years past. Time faded the paint and flecked it away, leaving mostly brittle wood and a shiny doorknob worn smoother by a decade of different hands.

Walking became easier in an instant. Her weary muscles, lighter. Or maybe that was just her head after almost twenty-four hours of work.

She floated up the set of three stairs and lifted the smallest key on the keyring dangling from her belt, twisting the lock as easily as exhaling. And then, she was home.

Home was a two-story house with a narrow stairwell mere feet from the entrance. Home smelled of medicine and balms for Sidney’s joints and a cold, uneaten dinner. Home was dimly lit and easily memorized, with only a handful of narrow rooms full of mismatched furniture. Home was the house their father bought their mother after his first job with the Peaky Blinders, and now it belonged to her. No father. No mother. Just her and her brother and a bunch of ghosts.

Mattie hung her coat by the door and removed the ring of keys from her belt, careful not to jangle them when she slipped them into a pocket. She shook out her hands as she moved from the entrance into the front parlor that was no longer a parlor.

A bed stood pushed against one of the walls with long bands of cloth hanging from the ceiling just above it. By the bedside, a wheelchair sat away from the bunched up rug and the couch no one ever sat on and the chairs that only collected dust and discarded books. There was no blood soaking into the floorboards or spattered on the pale yellow wallpaper. Relief stretched all the way down to her throbbing fingertips.

Sidney slept on his back with his head turned up towards the ceiling, eyes shut and brow furrowed and bandage carefully covering most of the right side of his face.

A foot stuck out of his bedding. The room was cold, and in all likelihood, his skin was even colder.

Crossing the darkened parlor from the door to his bed was like maneuvering through a field of land mines, so she removed her shoes and held them in one hand, using her heels rather than her toes to cross the old floorboards and make her way over to him. Covering his foot with a bit of bedding was easier than being quiet. He didn’t even stir as the sheets shifted beneath a pinch of her forefinger and thumb.

She hesitated as she turned to leave, her sore fingertips trailing over the corner of his bed. She wanted to say hello, to wake him up with a smile and tell him about where she’d been. Four days had passed since the last time they saw each other for more than fifteen minutes at breakfast.

But Mattie only had to remind herself of why she was working with the Shelby family.

They represented a step forward. They represented protection and solidarity in a town where there wasn’t much of anything else good. When their baby sister died in an accident in Charlie Strong’s yard, they gave her father a place in their gang. When their father died, Polly Gray gave Sidney a job of his own. When Sidney came back from the War without the use of his legs, they gave him an allowance. When even that wasn’t enough, Polly turned her attention to Mattie.

With steady work like that, Mattie could support them both for the rest of her life, and she’d still have a little extra for…

 _Stupid fucking girl,_ she thought as she made her way back into the entrance, shoes still in-hand and footfalls soft on the rug that ran the length of the hall. _You don’t even have the money, and you’re already thinking about what you’ll buy with it._

A new set of brushes, maybe. Or a stack of canvases. A new easel without a wobbly rear leg.

She bit down hard on her bottom lip to ward off those senseless thoughts, but only ended up smiling, giddy and full of promise.

A tube of Prussian blue for Arthur Shelby’s eyes.


	2. CHAPTER II : silver buttons.

“Miss Blackham’s dress needs a new zipper.”

Mattie scribbled down a reminder in her notebook, turning her whisper into a hurried tilt on the page. Sunlight shone through the window over her shoulder, and her pencil threw a flickering shadow over the page.

“Mrs. Deely asked for new buttons on her coat, and Mrs. Hemming, for the indigo blouse. Miss Underhill needs her slip hemmed.”

She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth as she read over the notes she’d taken. Even in the pool of pure sunlight that shone on her desk — her _table_ — she could barely make one letter from another. Her eyes were blearier than she realized upon returning to work, turning the crisp scratch of her pencil to a dark gray blur in her notepad. The fifteen minutes of sleep hadn’t done much to remedy that.

Blinking, she rubbed at her eyes with her free hand before pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

On the far side of her table, a dish with her half-eaten breakfast sat on top of an unfurled cloth napkin. Any desire to eat had been tossed right out of the window after watching Mister Chapman devour what she’d brought him, as if his poor wife didn’t feed him. He grinned at her with twin smears of cream at the corners of his mouth once he finished his toast. The sight made her stomach turn.

She shook her head and pinched at the bridge of her nose again.

Miss Blackham’s dress. Zipper. Mrs. Deely and Mrs. Hemming — buttons. Miss Underhem. Hilled.

“Shit,” Mattie muttered under her breath.

_Miss Underhill. Hemmed._

Behind her, the door to the changing room opened, and Frank Chapman emerged with a much smaller man in tow, one who couldn’t have looked like he belonged there if he tried for a thousand years.

In Frank’s barrel-chested shadow, the man seemed fragile as a wishbone with hair just as white. He rushed after him, not sparing Mattie so much as a glance, while working his flat cap around in his broad-knuckled hands. There was a look of awe on his face — awe and gratitude. That was her first clue that something wasn’t right. No one ever looked at Frank like that. Not even her, when she was trying her best to slip out from under his hands.

“Thank ya, sir.” The man scrambled over his words like a spider trying not to slip into the bath. “Thank ya.”

Mattie sat up a little straight in her chair. The shift of her weight caused its wood to creak, and Frank’s head snapped in her direction, all sharp angles and dark, heavy brows.

She stopped moving.

“You can see yourself out,” Frank said to the man with a smile that was too broad and toothy to belong to anyone who wasn’t American. “Come by later for the rest.”

The man flipped his cap onto his head and gave him a determined bob of a nod. And then, just as quickly, he was gone.

She hadn’t seen him enter, hadn’t heard the bell at the door. Had she dozed off? Or had she been so distracted by cleaning up Frank’s breakfast that she just hadn’t noticed? There was no way of knowing in hindsight. All she could do was hope that it had nothing to do with her.

Once the shop’s front door opened and the bell rang out like a shout, Frank turned to her, and all that hope dried in an instant.

Mattie pressed her lips together and tugged her hands into fists where they landed on her skirt. Weathering Frank Chapman wasn’t easy, but she’d managed in the past. She could manage again, if it came down to it.

“So,” Frank began, tucking his broad hands into the pockets of his suit jacket. He stepped in her direction, rolling from heel to toe with ease. Confidence drifted behind him like a particularly pungent brand of cologne. “Whatcha workin’ on, Miss Wharton?”

Nerves surfaced in her mostly empty stomach. The burning hit her instantly.

“Getting ready for the day,” she said with a small smile. “I’ve got a zipper for Mrs. Deely’s coat.”

Frank tucked up right behind her and leaned against her table on the flat of a palm. His eyes found her notebook, skimming over her plans as a smile grew on his face. “Mrs. Deely’s coat, huh? A zipper?”

Mattie swallowed hard. “Miss Blackham’s dress. A zipper for her dress.”

 _Fuck_.

She shut her eyes and bit back a shiver as Frank pulled back with a thoughtful noise. Her expectations ranged from a smack to the back of the head and a sudden, full-handed grasp on the back of her neck, and she was wrong on all accounts. He stepped back and circled around the front of her table instead, waiting there until she could meet his eyes.

When she did, Mattie found that he was still smiling. It was too tight to ease any of her worries. Too tight, too big, too full of teeth.

“You must be real tired, busy workin’ girl like yourself.”

Outside Mister Chapman’s shop, up in the sky, clouds moved over the sun and pulled darkness over Small Heath. In her belly, Mattie felt a wash of dread. It wasn’t a question, but she still felt the dogged urge to answer him, to cover for herself, to make an excuse or grab for an explanation with both hands.

 _You talk too much_ , her father told her once, gripping her jaw hard enough to squash her cheeks and make her teeth ache. _You give yourself up with it._

Her teeth ached then, too, as she clenched them as hard as she could to keep from digging her own grave. For all she knew, someone had already dug it for her.

“I heard you left the shop after four this morning,” Frank continued, his accent thickening with the anger evident by the redness rising in his cheeks. He pressed both hands to her desk and leaned forward, almost near enough for his shadow to eclipse her entirely. “Went straight for the Shelby house, in the rain.”

Dread slipped its fingers into fear’s, solidifying in her gut and weighing her shoulders down into a guilty curve.

“What was that about, huh, sweetheart?”

Mattie sucked in a shaky breath. “Mended a skirt,” she lied, poorly. “For Ada Shelby.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Wouldn’t think to, sir.”

Lightning struck in the form of a swiped hand that tossed the plate on her desk against the far wall, shattering it into dozens of pieces with a crash that pulled a whimper out of her throat. Buttered bread, cloth napkin, remnants of a dish her grandmother had given the family when her mother got married — all of it fell to the floorboards.

“Don’t! Fucking! Lie to me!”

When Mister Chapman got angry, his accent warped. The stylish American became something else, something messy and sharp and difficult to understand. He sounded like he was from somewhere halfway between Baltimore and Birmingham, but that would’ve been the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

Mattie stared into his eyes and thought of him treading water.

Thought of him drowning.

“If you’re working with the Shelbys, I want you outta here!” Frank Chapman jabbed a finger towards the door. His hand swayed in midair, pointing like the blade of a boot knife. But then, before the silence could turn into anything else, he gave a huff of a laugh and used that same hand to smooth back his black hair. “You deceitful fucking cunt. You’re gonna get your stupid ass cut.”

“I…”

Frank cut her off.

“Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.” He slammed his hands down onto the table hard enough to send her pencil down onto the floor, rolling until it reached the toe of his boot. She fought against a flinch and lost. “I don’t have a single damned reason to listen to you. Not a damned one.”

It wasn’t as if his reaction didn’t make sense. It wasn’t as if fear of the Peaky Blinders didn’t fuel everything in Birmingham, right down to the fires that kept storefronts like his warm. Hearing that the only other person in your employ left your store at such an absurd hour to visit the Shelbys would’ve put ice in a person’s veins, as long as they had sense.

She deserved this for going behind his back, for lying to him.

“Now, clean that shit up.”

Frank Chapman turned and adjusted how his fitted suit jacket sat on his broad shoulders. He maneuvered past cabinets full of zippers and ribbon and thread, past standing shelves stacked high with bolts of fabric, past mannequins for both women and men standing on polished wooden legs. Every time he thumped into something, Mattie gave a jolt, until he finally got to the front of the shop and yanked his chair out from behind his desk. The sound was like nails against a chalkboard, and the pale hairs at the back of her neck responded by standing.

She pushed out her own chair with a scrape that couldn’t even be compared and stood on shaky feet. Her heart skipped awkwardly in her chest, but she had no opportunity to pay it any mind, not with such a mess to clean.

Picking up the pail she kept beside her desk for fabric scraps, she went over to the mess he’d made and crouched in front of it.

The uneaten breakfast was easiest to clean. She plucked it up by its crust and dropped it onto a bed of old strips of linen. The cloth napkin could be salvaged, but the plate itself was ruined beyond measure. The pieces were too small to be mended.

So, one by one and with cloudy eyes, Mattie picked up the shattered pieces of the plate and dropped them into the pail.

Something she got from her father — other than harshly worded advice — was an unexpected rage. Josiah Wharton was a man with a round belly and a soft face that grew hot when someone pushed him. And his anger? His anger was never born from bile, but from fear and desperation. His fury was fueled by his weakness, and at his weakest, he had been a terror.

Mattie thumbed over a shard of porcelain that narrowed to a point.

She took a slow breath and shut her eyes before dropping it into the pail to join the others.

The moment the shard clattered against the other pieces, the bell above the door chimed to announce a new customer. Scooping up the rest in her hands, she deposited the pieces into the pail as she craned her neck to listen.

There was a narrow place between two shelves with a tiny hole carved into the wall, just barely broad enough for someone to push into it sideways. Someone smaller than her.

She’d tried to sneak a look once and got caught trying to wiggle out of it. Frank stood there for a full few minutes to watch her struggle. He didn’t say anything, but there was enough amusement in his eyes to spill over into the corners of his mouth.

Never again would she try to get a look into the greeting room like that. The humiliation wasn’t worth it.

And she didn’t want to sneak anymore.

The new customers clattered through the door on more than two feet. She heard a wet, pained groan, and then, Frank’s familiar sputter of indignation. “I! You! Y-You’ve got some nerve bringing this into my shop!”

“Aye, I’ve got buckets of the stuff.”

Mattie pushed herself up from the floor as her heart sank into her belly. She nearly left it there on the floor with how quick she shot across the workroom and flung open the door. The familiar voice pushed her pulse into a sprint. She’d already been caught out somehow, but she didn’t need Arthur Shelby on Frank Chapman’s doorstep to make things worse.

He stood before the front desk with the man from earlier held limply at his side, blood trailing from the corner of his mouth and onto his dirty collar. There was no fight left in him, either from pain or from fear. Every time he tried to stand on his own, he slipped and failed, hands floundering to make purchase on the desk. Not that Arthur would’ve allowed it. The man managed to get one leg straight once, but was knocked back down by one of Arthur’s knees.

“This nosy fucker said you two was working together,” Arthur spat. Leaning over the desk, he drew his and Frank’s faces closer together.

Frank was the first to lean back.

“He offered me information on my way to open the shop this morning.” Frank’s normally robust voice felt fragile in the air. His square jaw tensed, a muscle flickering across it as he clamped down his teeth. His hands curled into the bundle of fabric he’d been working on, a mess of thread and buttons spread over the tabletop. “Private business.”

Mattie eased a half-step out of the doorway and into the storefront. Her fingers trembled when they left the doorknob.

“Private, is it?” Arthur’s brows shot up, sending ripples over his forehead. His lips parted in an open-mouthed smile that creased the corners of his eyes, too. “Private business what involves me and my family, yeah? Don’t that make it my business, too?”

The man by Arthur’s side coughed. Blood spattered onto the desk, darkening the brown suit jacket with spots of bright red.

“I’m s-sorry!” A piercing pleading note found his voice, and his face twisted into another dark apology, tears treading through the dirt hiding in the lines on his face. “I was a bloody fool for saying anythin’!”

Frank’s mouth twisted into a frown right as Mattie realized who the man was apologizing to. Not the man he betrayed, but the man who’d beaten him bloody.

“Saw this one sneakin’ out of your shop like a tomcat on the prowl,” Arthur said with a laugh, yanking the man onto his feet and sneering down at him. “’E was full o’ fuckin’ promise, so I knew something was up. Seeing as I was on my way to check on my suit, I decided to get involved.”

He dropped the man again, but this time, he plummeted all the way down to the floor, kicking desperately at the rug as he tried to catch himself. The impact left him groaning and staring straight up at Mattie.

“Seems it was a good call.”

Mattie curled her hands into her skirt, but didn’t move from her spot to help him, not even when he reached out to her. She had a sweet, round face and was easily — and wrongly — mistaken for someone with a soft heart.

“He knows.”

The words were out of her mouth before she could think, but Mattie didn’t make an attempt to stop them or shrink back when they burst forth. Instead, she tucked her shoulders back and lifted her chin.

Frank Chapman’s head snapped in her direction the moment he heard her voice, but Arthur took his time, following the tailor’s sight lines to where Mattie stood in the doorway leading to the workrooms. He tilted his head to the side, hair flopping over the shaved side of his scalp.

“Knows, does he?”

Mattie stared into Frank’s eyes as she spoke. “He threatened to rob me of my position here because I’m working with your family.” The dawning horror in her boss’s eyes made her feel stable in a way she hadn’t since she’d taken the commission. Every nerve in her body turned to steel worked by steady hands. “Screamed in my face. He pitched a bloody fit, called me a cunt.”

All color drained from Frank Chapman’s broad face as Arthur turned to look at him again.

“Now, that ain’t no way to talk to a lady.”

There was more that she could say. She could stand there for hours without taking time to breathe in between words, and she’d still have more to tell Arthur Shelby about the stylish American monster who employed her. Comments about her weight, about her face, about her clumsy work, even though he was often the cause of it. Hands in her hair, on her hips, on her ass, up under the hem of her skirt. Threats to her person, to her brother, to her fucking cat. Everything she touched, he threatened or condemned or fucked.

She hated him. It didn’t seem like a strong enough word, but if she spoke it, _hate_ would drip with blood when it hung from her lips.

“I can’t stay here,” Mattie said, her insistence pushing her a step towards them. “I can’t.”

“I’ll talk to Pol.” When Arthur spoke, he didn’t look at her. He stared directly at Frank Chapman with an expression that bordered upon unreadable. She didn’t know what he planned on doing. Frank didn’t, either, given the rising terror filling up his own face. “We’ll get you outta here.”

Frank opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get out a word, Arthur moved.

His bloodied hand dug into Frank’s thick, black hair and gripped hard enough to pull a dog-like whine out of him. And then, with a snap of his arm, he slammed Frank’s face down into his desk with a crunch that turned Mattie’s stomach.

When he tugged Frank’s head back up, blood streamed from his nose and into his mouth. The impact had stuck two silver buttons to his cheek; they clung on even as the man sucked in a shocked breath and sobbed.

“Finish up the suit at home,” Arthur said as he took an uneven step back and shot a look in her direction. “You don’t work here anymore.”

Mattie’s mind raced for words to pick up, but they moved around like shards of porcelain, just out of reach. Finally, with a mad grasp, she found five.

“Do you have any requests?”

Arthur scratched at his jaw with blunt and dirty fingernails. He grinned to himself and reached out, plucking the two buttons off of Frank’s cheek and bouncing them in his palm. “I’d like these for the sleeves. Could ya do that?”

She bobbed her head before rushing forward and snatching the buttons from the desk.

While Frank mopped up the blood from his nose and the snitch clawed his way out of the door and Arthur waited around with his hands tucked into his pockets, Mattie stripped her workroom of herself. She bundled up Arthur’s suit and the blanket she’d been working on for Sidney in her idle time. Inside the soft folds of the blanket, she tucked a picture of her father and a drawing of Pansy and the ribbons she wore in her hair.

There would inevitably be something she left behind, but she made peace with that. She’d willingly abandon more than a knick knack or two in Frank Chapman’s shop of horrors if it meant never going back.

Once she was satisfied, Mattie hurried into the storefront with her arms full and her heart pounding. Heat throbbed in her cheeks and ears, sweat dampening the nape of her neck beneath her long fall of hair. She took one last look at Mister Chapman before stepping around Arthur Shelby and through the front doors.

It didn’t feel like a victory. It didn’t feel like freedom, either.

But it felt like a wobbling step forward.

And when she glanced over her shoulder, she saw Arthur step out onto the sidewalk behind her, hands in his pockets, long legs bringing him up quick.

Mattie squeezed her arms around the blanket and suit folded in her arms, and she waited for him to catch up before looking again. She thought of the blood he was smearing on the insides of his pockets, of the splintering skin of his knuckles, of the massive swaths of red left behind in the shop. Never again would she care a whit for Frank Chapman, but his shop had been half a home for her for years now, ever since Sidney left to fight. Now, she left it behind, bloody.

Grief and fear would find her later. She could feel the beginnings of it in her chest — a growing tightness that threatened to branch up into her throat. Whether she cried or raged, she hardly knew. She never did until it happened.

“The snitch was Lester,” Arthur said as he fell into stride with her. She didn’t care to know his name, but nodded anyway. “Fuckin’ prick.”

Mattie’s lips parted to disagree, but found that she couldn’t. The man had sold her out to her boss for a few shillings. He deserved what he got for putting her into danger. She could only imagine what might have happened if Arthur hadn’t been passing at the time, if he hadn’t noticed the store he was leaving.

“Should’ve given him worse,” she huffed.

When she turned down the street that lead right into hers, Mattie expected Arthur to keep going forward, but he shifted his course to match hers and slowed so as not to overtake her. The air was all smoke and horses, and she lifted the bundle in her arms to bury her nose in it, grateful that the fabric didn’t smell of iron.

Arthur laughed under his breath. “Worse, huh?”

“Both of them.”

Much changed when walking down the street with a member of the Peaky Blinders. Everyone gave them a wide berth. Some averted their eyes while others left forced niceties at their feet. The sound of ongoing work quieted. Even the horses lashed to carriages stopped snorting quite so loudly. But strangest of all, even after everything that had happened, Mattie felt safe with a Shelby at her side rather than afraid.

“Gave ‘em what they deserved,” Arthur said as they rounded another corner onto her street. He mopped at his brow with his bloody hand and bruising knuckles. “A warning. Screw over someone working for us, and they’ll get worse, served on a fuckin’ platter.”

“Mister Chapman—”

Mattie bit down on her bottom lip and took one last breath of the blanket before reaching for the keys dangling from her belt. Her hand swished through the place where they usually hung, coming up empty. She blinked. Looking down, she realized that there was nothing riding on her belt, nothing clinking with every step, just air and the folds of her skirt.

“Chapman what?” Arthur asked, his brow furrowed and hard, just as Mattie pressed an anxious hand to her own forehead.

“Fuck!”

Arthur grabbed her by her shoulder, stopping them mid-stride. “Fuck what?”

“My bloody keys!” Terror spiked the volume of her voice. She stared up at him, blue eyes wide and afraid. She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t afford to have her locks changed. And on Saturdays, Mrs. Llewellyn brought Sidney down to Charlie Strong’s yard to visit with the horses. “I knew I was gonna leave somethin’, but did it have to be my bloody keys?”

The attention that Arthur Shelby discouraged was brought back around to them with her mounting panic.

Without a thought, she turned from Arthur and took off in a run down the sidewalk, trailing her pale blue skirt and the arms of Arthur’s suit jacket behind her. Strangers watched as she scurried up her doorstep in a mess of frizzy brown waves and splotchy red cheeks, as she set her things on the top step and began to desperately pat the many pockets of her jacket. She checked them all one by one, from the ones inside the lining to those outside. They were full of spooled ribbon and blunt pencils and measuring tape and —

Mattie’s fingers looped through her keyring, and relief surged through her like the tide. She sank down onto the step just as Arthur slowed to a stop in front of her.

Burying her face into her knees, Mattie pressed the keys to her cheek and let go of a grateful sigh.

“I woulda got them for ya.”

There was a softness in his voice that hadn’t been there in the shop. It sounded like it came from a different man, like a sober version of the one who’d answered the door that morning. She looked up at him and saw that softness in his eyes, too, as if the skin on his hand wasn’t broken and there wasn’t blood on his suit.

“Thank you,” she said. She put all of her heart in those two words.

He looked away, rubbing a hand through his hair and half-smiling, half-wincing. “Yeah, well. You’re one of us now. Pol said as much when she saw John in his suit.”

Mattie grinned, and when she caught Arthur hurriedly looking away a second time, her shoulders pitched forward in a tired laugh.

There was so much about the Shelby family that she could be afraid of. They were thieves and killers, tinkers with a bad reputation. They owned nearly every inch of Small Heath and ruled over it with a fist made of hard-worked steel. But then, she spent ten minutes around Arthur Shelby, and they didn’t seem so frightening.

His reputation for violence was well-earned. Every pale scar on the freckled skin of his hands was there because of the fire that burned inside of him. She’d gotten her first taste of that, and it still coated her tongue in something slick and awful and red.

But she had a fury, too. She couldn’t be afraid of her own teeth.

“I’ll get the suit to you tonight,” Mattie offered, pulling her things from the shop into her lap. She thumbed over the unfinished hem of a dark blue sleeve, over the uninspiring choice of buttons Mister Chapman had made. Then, it hit her. “D’you have the buttons?”

“Buttons?”

Arthur stared. He stared and stared and stared until he remembered, just as she had. “Oh, fuck!” Digging a hand into his pocket, he fished out two silver buttons and offered them to her. “So’s every time I wear this suit, I’ll think about crushing that smug fucker’s face in, eh?”

“Still think he deserved worse.” Mattie carefully lifted the buttons from his palm and tucked them into the needle pouch on her belt. “But I appreciate what you did, Mister Shelby.”

His eyes widened, shock stretching out his expression to a comical degree. He gave a loud laugh and shook his head. “Nah, Mister Shelby’s me dad.”

“Only trying to be professional,” Mattie said with a twist of a smile before bobbing in a halfway elegant curtsy. Arthur made a show of stumbling back a step and waving his hands in front of himself. But that didn’t stop her; it encouraged her. “Mister Shelby.”

“Alright, you little witch.” Arthur’s laugh was rough as sandpaper and sweet as cordial. She wanted to bottle it. “Won’t be at home later. Bring the suit to the Garrison.”

Giving her head a shake, Mattie turned and worked her key into the lock, twisting her wrist until she felt the triumphant click. She was no stranger to the Garrison, but she hadn’t had time lately to go for a drink. Work bled into sleep and breakfast and precious few moments with her brother. But she’d go for work, and she’d go if Arthur asked her to.

“Sounds about right,” she said without turning around, her heart still racing and her cheeks warm from smiling. “I’ll be there.”

Mattie stepped past the threshold and shut the door behind her. Her hands fell to her sides, blanket and three-piece suit falling from her grip and onto the dusty floorboards. She couldn’t fall to her knees without knowing Sidney was out of the house. Doing everything she could do not to worry him preceded any response she might have had.

Her weight shifted onto her right foot as she clamped her hand over her mouth and shut her eyes.

Behind her lashes, the first thing she saw was the plate. The fucking plate. She saw it in pieces, scattered across the floor, pale as bone and covered in tiny painted flowers.

Her heart sank, but she couldn’t sink except to pick up what she’d dropped as Mrs. Llewellyn rolled Sidney into the entryway.

Concern crossed his half-hidden features as he watched her with eyes the same color as her own. His fingers curled at the arms of his wheelchair until his knuckles flared white, as if he wanted nothing more than to help her, and the reminder that he couldn’t twisted the corner of his mouth sharply downward.

“Everything alright, love?” Mrs. Llewellyn asked, leaving Sidney where he was to do what he wanted so badly to do. She bent and lifted up the suit jacket with soft, timeworn hands. Ropes of veins that matched the blue of Arthur’s suit shifted beneath her skin. “Not like you to be home so early. And you’re so flushed! Taking a cold, maybe?”

“I’m alright.” Mattie glanced over the woman’s shoulder and met her brother’s eyes. She echoed the sentiment with a gentler, but more insistent touch meant for him. “I’m alright.”

Sidney nodded, and Mattie scooped the half-finished blanket and nearly-finished suit into her arms. She hoped he believed her, but she would talk to him before long to reassure him. It was all she could do without telling him exactly what was going on.

“Who…?”

Pain crumpled Sidney’s brow like newspaper under frustrated hands. He gripped at the arms of his wheelchair for a different reason, but stared up at her with dry eyes once the ache faded.

“The man outside?” Mattie asked, filling in the blanks left by the hole in Sidney’s face and the pain that hounded him like an unspent bullet. She went to his side and leaned over him, her hair brushing over his face and back as she left a kiss on the top of his head. “Just a customer. Things went… bad at Frank’s shop, but we’ll be alright. I’ve got work.”

Sidney reached up and gripped onto her arm as she moved away. He was stronger now than he’d ever been.

The bandages wrapped around half of his face were yellowed near his jaw, with tiny bloody flowers of pale pink. His lips were still bruised, though the bruising had faded to a similar shade of sickly yellow that stretched down over his chin. He looked as tired as she felt. The lines around his eyes plucked at her already tender heartstrings.

“We’ll talk,” she whispered. “Later. Tonight?”

His lips parted, as if he yearned to respond with words, but he closed them with a twinge of painful defeat in his face. He nodded without struggling around a single word and sank back into his chair.

Before long, when she knew things were secure, Mattie would tell him the full truth.

Until then, she would ease his mind and hope to God that it eased hers, as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to thank everyone who left comments, kudos, and bookmarks. I've been Going Through It lately -- family issues, etc -- and every little interaction with this fic has made everything so much brighter. I love you, and I hope you enjoyed this chapter, too! 💕


	3. CHAPTER III : the room where it happens

The Garrison was all but deserted when Mattie arrived with the finished suit around dinnertime.

All the regulars were back home with their families for a reluctant supper before returning once the sun went down. Harry Fenton stood behind the bar, wiping down the same spot he’d been cleaning for a full minute’s time, while Grace poured some long-haired man a whiskey. One of the booths was the location of a business deal between three men with their heads bowed down close together. And in one of the chairs was an older man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, burned down to the butt.

Eying one of the empty booths, Mattie crossed the dusty floor with Arthur’s blue suit in her arms. She squeezed into the seat facing the door and set her delivery down beside her hip. With it, she tucked the small military sewing kit she brought along to finish up the seams if Arthur was pleased with the results.

The pubs of Small Heath weren’t unfamiliar territory for her. She knew them better than anyone would want her to admit, having followed her father into them during daytime hours with Sidney at her side. They sat beneath tables and drew on spare pieces of paper. They drank tall glasses of water and the occasional cordial when their father was feeling generous. Sometimes, bartenders gave them snacks, too. The nicest of them did.

Fenton gave her more than anyone else. He still smiled when she walked through the doors.

Only two things changed about the Garrison since she first walked in with her dad — the scuff marks on the floor were more plentiful, and the windows were cloudier.

Mattie reached into the largest of her pockets. The edge of her tiny sketchbook bumped against her fingertips before she grabbed it and brought it out onto the table in front of her.

Each of the beginning pages were bloated and rippled with watercolor, darkened by pencil sketches, full of drawings of the mundane. A blackbird and a bowl of currants. A tangle of ribbons. The harsh, but worn angles of the stable in Charlie Strong’s yard. A horseshoe, a half-eaten tart, a stack of books at the foot of her brother’s bed.

There were portraits of Sidney, of herself. One of Polly Gray’s profile and another few disjointed scribbles of Arthur. Not of his entire face, but snippets of it — his thin lips curled into a smile, the lines around his blue eyes, the careless flip of his hair.

She flipped the page, feeling foolish.

Arthur said he would be there at the Garrison for the night, but he was nowhere to be found. The snug’s door hung open far enough for everyone to see it was uninhabited, and the conversation around the pub was quiet enough to rid anyone of the notion that a Shelby was in the vicinity.

Heels against the floor’s worn wooden slats drew Mattie’s attention up from a fresh page, her hand still stuck in the pocket where she’d stowed her pencil. Grace stood in front of her, a flaxen wave sliding forward from behind her ear as she leaned to cast a curious look into her notebook. When she realized there was nothing to discover, she pulled back with a quiet, “Would you like anything to drink?”

Mattie swallowed. Her throat wasn’t dry, but a prickle of nerves made her consider saying _yes_ rather than _no_.

“Nah,” she said with a smile, even though she found herself longing for the warming burn of alcohol to keep her mind from racing in sharp, panicked lines. “Waiting on someone.”

Grace left her without another word and stopped by the booth behind to take another three orders from the businessmen in shades of black and gray. They spoke together when she left, slightly louder than a whisper and just enough for her to hear over the senseless mumble that reached the rafters otherwise. She didn’t _mean_ to overhear them, but overhear them, she did.

Rubbing the tip of her pencil mindlessly against the page, Mattie furrowed her brow and pressed her back flush against the leather seat.

“— been asking questions around Camden. All roads, eh?”

“Lead to this shithole, apparently.”

“I saw the truth shining off his bald head. Knew he was trouble the second he started fucking twitching.”

“What’d you say his name was?”

“Dabney.”

“ _Danny_.”

There weren’t many men she knew who wore their hair the same way Daniel Owen did, not unless they’d lost every strand off their heads with age. But Daniel Owen was dead and buried in the same cemetery as her father. She’d seen his widow clutching the hands of two small boys with the wind tearing through her skirt, shadowed by the rusty iron fence that surrounded the area.

Her pencil slowed.

If Danny wasn’t dead, then poor Rosie thought he was for a reason.

“Sabini’s boys are ready to snap their jaws on him.”

“And it’s not as if Solomons wants us to protect the bastard, even on his grounds.”

Mattie eased her sketchbook shut. There was no paying attention to the whorl of gray on the pages with her ears grown twelve sizes larger on account of the whispering at her back. She wanted to hear more. Maybe she could figure out something to give Arthur, something wrapped in a bow for all he’d done for her that morning.

If that meant spying…

“We’ll get some bloody answers, I’ll tell you that.”

“From who? The barmaid?”

All three of them laughed. Their laughs were all different — high and low and middling, nasal, confident, skittish.

Abandoning her sketchbook and Arthur’s suit and her sewing kit was the last thing she thought to do, but something pulled her out of the booth and onto her feet. Skeletal hands, maybe, in the shape of her father’s. A whisper on the smoky air that said something about legacies.

Three men stared up at her from their empty glasses, expressions sober save for a slash of lingering amusement on one’s mouth. They were all older than her by at least a decade, with graying hair and sagging skin around their eyes and chins. One of them had a milky eye and a slash that bisected one side of his face. Another — the one still smiling — canted his head to the side.

“Who’s this, now?”

“Ah, sorry,” Mattie said, laughing her own laugh as she gave her head a scratch. “Couldn’t help but overhear you gentlemen talkin’ ‘bout a Danny?”

Their brows flattened at her word, as if they were all strung by the same hand. The worst that would happen at the Garrison was them ignoring her. They wouldn’t dare try to kill her, would they?

A bolt of worry lit her heart up like a light.

“Big, burly fellow?”

She couldn’t show a single fucking sign of how afraid she was, not if she wanted to get anywhere.

When they were children, she and Sidney would dress up like each other and try to convince their parents of who they were. Her brother was terrible at it; his voice broke when he tried to mimic hers, all high and sweet like a bird’s call. But Mattie? Mattie could be whatever she wanted to be, provided she had time enough to prepare. And a minute of spying didn’t count for much preparation.

The man with the scar and the milky eye put his elbow on the table and leaned forward, a bushy brow hitched up on his forehead.

“You know him, do you?”

Mattie set her hands on the table between the three of them and bobbed her head in an enthusiastic little nod. “I do! Lives down the street from me, Danny does. He’s got three little girls with hair as black as his.”

Confusion settled on the table like dirt at the bottom of a lake.

“Black hair, huh?”

“Mm-hmm.” Mattie grinned — all dimples and pink cheeks, a cherub with a knife behind her back. “He’s got the thickest head of hair north of London.”

Glancing over her shoulder to cast a look around the pub for any potential allies, she felt her heart trip over itself in her chest. Fenton would be useless. He had an honest face and couldn’t lie if you wrote down a script on his arm. She didn’t know Grace very well, and everyone else was a stranger to her… except for the long-haired man at the bar. She’d seen him slipping into the snug behind John Shelby, sharing a drink or five with Arthur.

“Hey!” She paused, fishing around in her head for a name. Scenes flew through her mind — smears of color and garbled notes in familiar voices — until she found one. “Samson!”

The man whipped around at the sudden shout of his name, glass in-hand and a bewildered look crossing his long face.

“Yeah?”

“These gentlemen are askin’ about Danny.”

Her smile tightened where none of Solomons’s three could see it, a sign that she needed help that she hoped he understood.

Fenton returned to cleaning up the shiny top of the bar while Grace returned a few recently used bottles to their place lining the wall. The other patrons turned back to their drinks, thinking better of getting involved in what was clearly Blinder business.

But Samson didn’t turn back to his drink. He set it on the counter and wandered over, taller than her by two heads and made of all limbs, lanky and well-dressed with his hair loose around his shoulders. It was the color of burnt chestnuts, darker and cooler than the hair on his jaw by a few shades and shiny in the white-golden light that danced with dust around him as he moved to her side.

“Our Danny?” Samson asked as he leaned an arm against the booth, his proximity making one of the men lean back. “Isn’t he up near Royston visiting family? He get into trouble up there, lads?”

“No trouble, and not in Royston.” The man wrinkled his nose. “What happens in Royston?”

“And not the same Danny.”

Maddie’s mouth pinched into a tiny frown, and she smoothed over the fabric of her skirt, looking as disappointed as she could make herself. They all looked at her. Stared at her, really. They were from toughest London, but most men had sympathy for sweet things as a predisposed weakness. There were a few exceptions and a few men she refused to even try such an act on, but these three hadn’t made the list.

“I wish I could have helped you three,” she sighed, her rounded shoulders sinking in a sigh. “It’s a shame. You traveled far for the wrong man.”

The man with the permanent half-smile smacked his hand down against the table, making Mattie jump and Samson tuck a hand at the small of her back. He shook his head and leaned forward, forefinger jabbing in her direction. “He said it was the Garrison. Small Heath, Birmingham. Said that’s where he came from.”

“Was he drunk?” Samson asked. He leaned right back at the man, looming over Mattie’s shoulder. “Where was he when he said all of this?”

“James,” one of the men warned, reaching over to nudge at his partner’s shoulder. “He said that at the top of his lungs, then he passed out cold on the floor. The man servin’ him drinks said he’d had six.”

The scarred man reached across the table and patted James on the side of his face none too gently. “Fucker was bald as a baby’s arse, besides. The lady says they’ve got a Danny with a head of black hair, don’t she?”

“Or she could be bloody lying.” He didn’t seem entirely convinced. A flush rose at the back of her neck and into her ears, the color bright as petals. “Might be one of his people.”

“Come on. She seems straight-cut enough.”

Mattie ducked her head. Anxious tears rushed into her eyes, reddening them and clinging to her long lashes. She dug both hands into her skirt and shook her head. “Our Danny’s a good man,” she protested, weakly. “The last thing him and his family needs is Londoners starting trouble with him just because some drunk in a club led you three astray.”

Samson petted over the top of her head, comforting enough to loosen the knots in her belly.

“I heard about ladies with my name as far away as America. Everybody’s got the same name as someone else.” She rubbed the heel of her palm into her eye. “And one of you is named James? I know five. At least.”

The one named James scooted across the leather seat and pushed up onto his feet. He was only a few inches sorter than Samson, which meant that Mattie still had to practically crack her neck to look up at him. He seemed satisfied, if a bit annoyed. The skin around his eyes tightened, drawing the light out of them. He slammed down his payment on the table before flicking a glance towards Samson and turning to leave. His friends followed.

She didn’t know who Solomons was, but she committed the name to memory for later. And she’d tell whatever Shelby was willing to listen to her that Danny was causing trouble for them… and himself.

The others followed suit with muttered complaints, squeezing around Mattie and Samson without another word.

With them gone, the Garrison got even quieter. Another man joined those against the bar, while Grace slipped out from behind the bar and headed in their direction. She removed a towel from the waist of her apron and stacked the glasses, her head on a swivel and eyes on them. “What was that about?” she asked in her faraway voice, sounding as delicate as the rest of her looked. “Was someone causing trouble?”

“Trying to,” Mattie said, thinking more than wondering aloud. She glanced up at Samson with a sweet half-smile and stretched out a chubby, short-fingered hand. “Thanks. Mattie Wharton.”

The sudden look of understanding on Samson’s face said, ‘Oh, Josiah’s daughter? Shame, that,’ like so many others did.

Mattie tried not to let that thump her between the ribs.

Instead, they shook hands, Samson smiled, and she didn’t feel the urge to run away from the massive footprints her father left on the floor of the Garrison like hand prints in dry mud.

“Samson Smith,” he told her. “Peaky Blinder. Excellent liar. Y’chose right today, sweetheart.”

His hands smelled of lavender. When she pulled her own back, the scent lingered on her skin, so different from the mild soap she always used. Sweeter and more floral by far. And strong, like he’d dug his hands into a bush.

Pieces fit together like fingers lacing, and she smiled in her understanding. Every time she saw the man with the long face and the long hair slip into the snug after John, every time he threw his arm around the second youngest Shelby’s shoulders… It all made a happy sort of sense.

He understood her. She understood him, too.

The doors leading into the pub flew open after mere minutes of getting acquainted with Mister Samson Smith. She learned precious little about the sweet-smelling gangster, only that he grew up with John and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Shelby family during the war. He spoke like he had music in his blood, all rising and falling and sharp crescendos of enthusiasm.

Mattie found herself listening to him with a smile on her face, though the twist to her lips fell away soon after, when the doors swung shut again behind Thomas and Arthur Shelby.

“Surprise?” Arthur asked his brother, loud enough to be overheard at the booths across the room. He nudged at his arm with a flick of his wrist. They walked together, practically matching each other’s step. She never saw two Shelbys stand so close unless there’d been a fight, a deadly risk, or a heart-to-heart. “Where is she?”

Their eyes met.

Samson laughed under his breath, and Tommy’s brows shot up, mouth twisting to the side. Mattie stared. Arthur stared harder for all of a moment before taking a long drink from the bottle clutched in his hand.

“He told me to come here,” Mattie muttered almost defensively. “It’s not chance.”

But her quick attempt at breaking up the moment was met with another, louder laugh from Samson at her side. He held up his hands in defeat, taking a rolling step back as she swatted at him.

Tommy and Arthur distracted themselves with the conversation they’d been having. The former flipped off his cap while the latter tugged his down a little farther on his head, big ears gone red with embarrassment.

Rather than entertaining Samson’s nonsense, Mattie slipped over to the booth that still had Arthur’s suit and her sewing kit on the seat and her sketchbook on the table. She pocketed it and scooped the nearly-finished suit into one of her arms. With her free hand, she picked up the kit and carried it in a white-knuckled grip. Her nerves couldn’t be listened to, not if she wanted to make any sense whatsoever. So, she squeezed back down onto the booth’s seat, her hip bumping against the edge of the table.

A wince and a shimmy later, her ass thumped against the cushioned leather, and she was able to think.

About the Londoners and their mean faces and the whispered name of _Solomons_. About the suit in her arms and what it meant for her future. About Daniel Owen and his bald head and his big mouth.

The light in the Garrison shifted from a dusty white-gold to the pure golden hues of a sunset. As Tommy and Arthur made their way around the pub, more men entered after their suppers and the end of their work day. No one asked her to move, at first. They filled up tables. They leaned against the bar. They stood around, conversing, laughing.

Space within the pub was limited, and five or six men could tuck into a booth comfortably. When the first man turned and looked at her, eyes hazy after a long day and jaw set, Mattie bolted into her feet without question, thumping her hip against the table and wincing a second time.

As soon as she took a few steps, the booth was full of men who smelled of sweat and metal and smoke. The scent of the alcohol in their glasses would follow them later.

Mattie did her best to navigate the crowd, but there was only so much she could do when treading through a sea of bodies. Most of them were aware of her and who she was, and a few gave her an affectionate pat on the head that was nowhere near as comforting as Samson’s. He’d disappeared back towards the bar long before, but when an arm scooped around her waist, she half-expected it to belong to him.

It didn’t.

The crowd parted for her and Arthur Shelby as he guided her in the direction of the snug. Everyone handled his passage with care, bodies pivoted to avoid bumping into him, eyes pointedly averted to keep from staring as he curled his arm low around a woman’s waist.

Someone in the mass of bodies whistled. Her ears burned like hot coals underneath her fall of thick hair.

Mattie knew she wasn’t the first woman to slip into the private room with Arthur. She couldn’t have been. For as long as she’d known him, he was the heir to the Shelby family. He was the leader, vicious and handsome and protective. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying no to him. Not out of fear, but out of wanting. Not that she…

The door swung fully open to give Tommy room to exit as they entered. He and his brother shared a look that Mattie didn’t understand, and then, the new leader was gone with only the smell of his cologne lingering in the air, somehow stronger than all the smoke and all the sweat.

“Fucking idiots,” Arthur laughed under his breath as he coaxed Mattie forward and shut the door. “They oughta know business is business.”

Business.

Mattie nodded and set the suit and her sewing kit on the table that stood in the middle of the room. The floor was shinier and smoother beneath her feet. The glass was cleaner. The space was quieter. In the low light, the seats seemed almost sumptuous.

She couldn’t begin to imagine everything that had happened inside of the Garrison’s snug.

How many lives had been touched or ended by the Shelby family, how many plans had been hatched, how many lips kissed, how many hearts broken.

“Never been in, eh?” Arthur shrugged out of his coat and slung it over a seat, leaving him in a vest made of fine charcoal wool and a stiff shirt as white as chalk. “’Spose it can be a bit, ah… intimidating.”

Mattie wrung out her hands. “I’ll finish the suit once you’ve tried it on.”

Arthur heaved a little laugh at her immediate deflection and shook his head. “It’s a nice enough place. Gets the job done.” He flashed her a grin as she picked up the vest from the bundle of dark blue. She caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye.

“You’ll need to get outta the vest, too. And the trousers.”

She focused on her own hands rather than looking at him, but in her periphery, she saw Arthur lean over and tug off his shoes one by one, dropping them onto the shiny snug floor before moving on to the five gleaming buttons of his vest.

Mattie swallowed. Hard.

“I’ll turn around.”

She did just as she said she would, staring at the wall of the pub with an intensity that couldn’t be matched. Every grain of wood, she picked out from the rest. She saw whorls of age and chips from thrown glasses and a patch where someone had likely set off a gun. The curtains were made of a beautiful burgundy velvet, cut precisely the right length to block out every beam of the sun in midday. There were places where the leather of the seats had been mended, too.

On closer inspection — with the rustling of clothes and the occasional grunt or amused chuckle from Arthur at her back — she realized they didn’t look entirely _sumptuous,_ as they had upon first glance.

They were as bumped and bruised as the ones outside. It was just darker in the snug past a certain hour, and you couldn’t see flaws in the dark.

Arthur took his time undressing as well as dressing. He tossed the vest down onto his jacket; she heard the rustling impact as her fingers laced and unlaced in front of her. Trousers were next, beginning with his belt, leaving him standing there in a long white shirt that was buttoned up to the very top… and his underwear.

_I’m a seamstress!_ her mind protested, annoyed with her own flushing face. _John nearly got his underwear tugged down by one of his boys. I’ve bathed Sidney fifty times since he got back from the war. What’s so different about Arthur Shelby? What has me in such a fucking knot?_

Her brows knitted.

Behind her, Arthur moved around to the table and began rummaging around for something. Trousers, maybe. Like a shot, her imagination provided a flurry of images — Arthur, tucking one of his skinny legs into a trouser leg; Arthur, buttoning up one of his dress shirts, the skin of his narrow chest disappearing inch by inch; Arthur, _unbuttoning_ —

He stumbled.

Arthur stumbled against the table and let out a merry string of curses under his breath. Probably got his foot caught in some life-threatening fold. It happened all of the time, but hearing that happen to a Shelby nearly snatched a laugh right out of her throat.

She pressed a hand to her mouth and bit down on her lip and crossed her eyes — anything to keep from giggling at him.

“Trousers fit well,” Arthur muttered once he righted himself. She heard the zipper, but not the button. And she heard him laugh, too, quiet and rough and under his breath. “Son of a bitch cut them for Tommy, not me. Always had a skinny arse.”

“Mister Chapman believes looser fitting clothes are more fashionable.”

She heard the sneer on Arthur’s face when he cut in with a jagged, “Mister Chapman’s a fuckin’ cunt.”

This time, Mattie couldn’t hold back the quiet snort of laughter that slipped between the cracks in her fingers. Her shoulders trembled, and she shook her head, willing herself to stop only to find it was impossible. “I… I’m sorry. Not laughing at you.”

“Nah, you’re laughing wit’ me.”

Arthur smoothed his toughened palms over the dark blue fabric. She could hear the whisper of contact as if he was running those same hands over her own skirt.

“You can turn ‘round now, if you want. I’m decent.”

She knew she Shelbys were decent people at the bones of it, but the suddenness of the phrase made her give another quiet snort as she turned around, cheeks full of heat and ears pounding painfully.

Many people thought Arthur Shelby was the weakest of all of them, the most watered down in every way but two. His strength and his fury were miles high and barely contained in his awkward body, all tendon and sharp relief of muscle. His ears were too big. His lips, too thin. They sat a little low on his face, and his chin wasn’t strong enough to counteract that. They thought he was stupid and disconnected, more concerned with brawls than betterment.

And maybe all of that was true.

But people said bad things about her, too.

They said her lips were too big for her already crowded face, almost like a fish. Her eyes looked sleepy. Her smile, forced. They said her hair was too long and too frizzy and too untamed. She was too fat by half, prone to bumping into everyone and everything with her broad hips. They said she was an idiot, easily distracted, dedicated only to herself.

Looking at Arthur in the dimly-lit Garrison, she just saw a man in half a suit. And she didn’t mind.

Once he was finished buttoning up the vest and pulling on the jacket, he flipped his head back and smoothed both hands over his hair. The grin on his face said more about how pleased he was than he could ever express in words. An unshakable kind of confidence shone on his face.

“It looks…”

“Looks damn fine, eh?” Arthur looked down at the sleeves, flipping them over and back a few times before checking the length of his trousers and jacket. Everything fit him perfectly. Mattie felt a bubble of pride in her belly. “Better than what that American swindler tried putting on me.”

Mattie worried her teeth over her bottom lip for a moment before she took in a deep breath and said, “You look handsome.”

It took everything she had left at the end of such a long day. It took that deep breath and Arthur’s shining confidence and her own simmering pleasure at seeing him the suit she tailored to pry the words out from behind her teeth.

Arthur’s eyes snapped up to hers from the belt around his waist.

She glanced away just as quickly. Her hands latched together behind her back, struggling to hold on to that confidence as it bled away.

“If you like how it fits, I can finish it right here,” Mattie said, her voice narrowing to a whisper as she stared at the table and the sewing kit and the shiny floor and the table and the sewing kit. “So you don’t have to wait another day.”

He cleared his throat, his discomfort evident to her. A rush of embarrassment forced her already shaky pulse into a stumble all around her chest. She should have shut up, stayed quiet, not made assumptions. Why would it be okay for her to say something like that to him? Especially if she had plans to work for his family?

God, what an unholy mess.

“But I can… go. If you’d rather wait. Or if you have s-somethin’ to do.”

Suddenly, she missed the girl from the night before, the one who looked up at him and gave as good as she got, the one who bantered without fear. But so much had happened since then, and after only a few minutes of sleep, she didn’t have the strength to be her.

Arthur didn’t respond immediately. She caught a few false starts, but didn’t quite meet his eyes before he finally said, “Here’s fine. I ain’t got a thing to do.”

Her head bobbed in a nod.

Outside of the snug, they heard a glass crash against something hard — the bar, a chair or table, or someone’s skull. The sudden sound made her jump, already much too skittish to be at a pub at such a late hour. Arthur twisted on his feet and pushed out of the door and with a bellowing voice shouted, “If I hear one’a you break another bottle, I’ll drown you meself!”

He slammed the door shut and locked it again, turning towards her with a different kind of smile on his face.

It was a feral, lopsided thing, all teeth and bright eyes.

“Take your time.” Arthur crossed over to the booth again, scooping up the suit he’d been wearing. Another change would be needed if he wanted her to finish up there. She’d look away again. Hopefully, he wouldn’t trip.

Their eyes met. His grin broadened.

“Did ya bring the buttons?”  
  
"I did," Mattie said, finding a much smaller smile of her own. "And I found something else along the way that I've got to tell ya."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone for their well wishes and continued support. things have managed to go from bad to worse, but i'm determined to keep going with this and not slack off too much. ❤ so, updates may be sparse, but will certainly be continued.


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